Tag: social media

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Haleluya Hadero of the Associated Press begins her report [Haleluya Hadero for The Associated Press]:

Hearing a lot about Lemon8 lately? You’re not the only one.

I have not heard of Lemon8. Is this going to be another Temu situation?

Ms. Hadero continued:

Amid a looming U.S. ban on TikTok, content creators have been pushing the platform’s sister app. Lemon8 resembles an amalgamation of the types of short-form videos found on TikTok and the picture-perfect aesthetic of Instagram and Pinterest.

Sister? TikTok has siblings other than the for-Chinese version of TikTok (since China does not allow TikTok)?

Like its popular relation, Lemon8 is owned by China-based ByteDance, whose collection of internationally available apps also includes the video editing app CapCut and the photo and art editing app Hypic. In addition, the company operates Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok that follows Beijing’s strict censorship rules.

TikTok should be banned (you were right the first time Mr. President-elect). When it tries to give you a lemon, you should also ban the lemon. When it tries to give you eight lemons, you should ban all eight lemons.

 

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Meta's fact-checking exit prompts urgent IFCN meeting by Pranav Dixit (Business Insider)
According to a 2023 report published by the IFCN, income from Meta's Third-Party Fact-Checking Program and grants remain fact-checkers' predominant revenue streams.

Business Insider referenced a 2023 report from the International Fact-Checking Network (shudders) about how the fact-checking complex is funded. [Business Insider] I followed a link to the report (credit to Business Insider for including it) and found the relevant passage:

Income from Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program and grants remain fact-checkers’ predominant revenue streams. Notably, grants now support approximately 87% of survey respondents, overtaking Meta’s 3PFC as the most common funding source. Other significant sources include training activities (55%) and memberships or user donations (50%).

[2023 State of Fact-Checkers Report by IFCN]

Meta was the second-biggest funder of the fact-checking complex after unpsecified grants. Page 14 of the report noted that 63.5% of members of the IFCN participated in Facebook’s third party fact-checking (3PFC) program in 2023, which was actually down from 66.7% in 2022, 66.3% in 2021, and 79.2% in 2020. Page 15 of the report noted that only 14.6% participated in TikTok’s (which should be banned) fact-checking program (the report noted that every participant in TikTok’s program also participated in Facebook’s program).

That the fact-checking complex was receiving significant funding from Facebook was hardly a secret, but the particulars are interesting now that Facebook is ending its fact-checking program. Regardless of how this changes Facebook, it will likely have a material effect on the revenue of some of the fact-checking entitities which participated in Facebook’s program. For whatever it is worth, I consider this news a positive development for reasons I discussed back in 2020 in my little-read Proposals for Fact-Checking Reform essay (which came at the height of the fact-checking industrial complex’s power). For a more incisive take, I largely agree with John Sexton’s post yesterday in HotAir, which was what initially led me to the Business Insider and IFCN reports. [John Sexton]

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According to Eric Lendrum of American Greatness: “A new survey shows that young Americans who frequently use the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok are much more likely to get their news from content creators rather than actual news outlets.” I am long on record as being an early member of the ban TikTok camp, specifically because no other great power in history would allow an adversary to perform live-action social experiments on its youngest citizens. I read this article about young people viewing CCP propaganda as an alternative to “actual news outlets” and thought “yes that is bad, but what is worse is that this is a battle between the resistable force and the movable object.”

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Blogger Chris Lovie-Taylor wrote about using WordPress Reader as his social network. I am only mildly acquainted with WordPress Reader because it is a part of wordpress.com instead of wordpress.org and both this site and The New Leaf Journal are powered by the WordPress software on a VPS. However, I do have a WordPress.com account and a created a single-page personal feed aggregator site (which could use a touch-up), so I have an idea of how WordPress Reader works. As Mr. Lovie-Taylor explains, you can automatically discover and follow WordPress.com site and add any site with an RSS/ATOM feed to your list of follows. I very much like the concept and appreciate that it allows following non-WordPress.com sites (.org sites can appear with the help of the Jetpack plugin but I am not running Jetpack on either of my sites). What I do not like is that it is tethered to WordPress.com. I think there is an idea here, however, for a “social” media site based on following external sites and sharing posts, maybe even with some Hypothes.is functionality.

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I have never used Linkedin. I have also never been tempted to use Linkedin. But what if Linkedin added some new feature to make me sign up? I quote from a report by Mr. Mauricio B. Holguin on AlternativeTo: “LinkedIn has introduced new AI-powered features aimed at improving professional networking, simplifying networking tasks such as making connections, job searching, and content sharing.” While using AI to help guide users’ Linkedin network interactions will surely (operative word) make Linkedin a better (other operative word) place, I will continue to sit on the sidelines.

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I decided to request an invite to Bluesky a couple of weeks ago when I saw that it allowed for using one’s own domain as a handle and had RSS support. I finally received my invite on February 4. I made my account, set it up with my domain, and added my Bluesky RSS feed to my feed aggregator site. Two days after I received my invite and made my account, Bluesky announced invite-free sign-ups.

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Reclaiming the Web with a Personal Reader by Facundo Olano (olano.dev)
I realized that I had been using Twitter, and now Mastodon, as an information hub rather than a social network. I was following people just to get notified when they blogged on their websites; I was following bots to get content from link aggregators. Mastodon wasn’t the right tool for that job.

I came across an interesting passage by blogger Facundo Olano in his blog post about creating a personal feed reader to follow good and meaningful writing from around the web (see the source code for his interesting feed reader project). He assessed his prior usage of Twitter (now “X”) and Mastodon and realized that he was “following people just to get notified when they blogged on their websites,” in effect “following bots to get content from link aggregators.” He concluded that “Mastodon wasn’t the right tool for the job.” I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Olano’s assessment as well as his preference for using personal feed readers to stay abreast of updates from interesting authors instead of social media platforms such as Facebook, X (or Twitter), and even Mastodon. Feeds are the best way for following individual websites and authors (combined with newsletters in some cases). Social media and networking serve different purposes, but I will grant that they can play a limited role in discovering new authors and articles (preferably combined with a read-it-later tool).